The Curious Affair of the Somnambulist & the Psychic Thief

by Lisa Tuttle

  He made no reply as another servant arrived with a tray of raw vegetables—sticks of carrot and celery, finely shredded cabbage, radishes, and hothouse tomatoes. I by no means despised any of those things, but an imp of perversity made me refuse. Mr. Chase murmured under his breath, “Jack Sprat would eat no fat/ His wife would eat no lean.”

  I took the bread roll that was offered next and added pickles and chutney to my plate. The sound of crunching filled my ears as my neighbor thoroughly masticated the raw carrots and celery, and for a little while I was relieved from the need to make conversation, although I was aware that I’d had no answer to my question. If I raised it again, I feared he would revert to his own unanswered questions about my relationship with Miss Fox.

  What did he know about my reasons for leaving the SPR? What did anyone know? Gabrielle had not mentioned it to me since our reunion, and I had heard nothing more about the investigation in Scotland beyond one vague reference in the SPR journal stating that a full report was “in preparation.” Since I had never shared my reasons for leaving with anyone, there should be no breath of scandal attaching to the name of my old friend, despite the insinuations of Mr. Chase.

  But why did I assume Mr. Chase was reliant upon the usual sources of gossip for his information? The man had special powers. Perhaps he could read thoughts, as Lady Florence believed. What if it was my own lingering doubts about Gabrielle’s honesty that had alerted him?

  At the thought that the man beside me might be in secret conversation, quite unknown to me, with the depths of my own self, I lost my appetite.

  “You are very quiet,” he observed.

  I stared down at the mess of half-eaten food on my plate and said nothing.

  “I hope…dear Miss Lane, I hope I have not offended you?”

  He sounded so anxious that years of social training took over, and I had to turn to reassure him, and as soon as I met his gaze, I was trapped again.

  “I never answered your question,” he said softly, looking deep into my eyes. “Are you angry?”

  “How could I be? I apologize if my question was too personal.”

  His eyes, never leaving mine, narrowed a little as he smiled. “I don’t mind personal questions…from you.”

  To drop my eyes now, I thought, would be to flirt and play a game of maidenly modesty—behavior I despised, so I stared back boldly. “Yet you avoid giving me an answer.”

  “You think I have, or wish to have, secrets from you?”

  I said sharply. “Mr. Chase, I find your tone and your attitude toward me quite…quite offensive.”

  I did not intend to make a scene, nor did I raise my voice, but unfortunately my unease had spilled over into annoyance during one of those moments—everyone has experienced them—when a sudden lull fell upon the gathering. In that quiet moment my angry words were heard by everyone in the room.

  “Forgive me,” he said, speaking distinctly. “I had no wish to offend. English manners are different from what I was used to at home—and different, too, from those on the continent. I’ve put my foot in it, I see. Can you forgive me?”

  Everyone heard that, too, of course. He knew they would; his apology was aimed at the audience, not me; and even though his eyes continued to bore into mine, as if to compel my compliance, I did not believe a word of it. But I had no wish to prolong the quarrel.

  “Of course. If no offense was intended, it was my mistake.”

  “Then we are friends again. I am glad.”

  I gave him a false smile and said nothing more. By this time, the sound of conversation had risen very nearly to a roar as everyone else around the table vied with one another to prove they weren’t listening to us.

  Mr. Chase said nothing more to me, nor I to him. I picked at my food and was grateful to the gentleman on my other side for initiating a conversation, however uninspired, until the meal ended. Then, even though it had not been a formal dinner, Lady Florence took on the role of her brother-in-law’s hostess and invited the ladies to retire with her, leaving the gentlemen to their port and cigars.

  At this, Mr. Chase announced that, as he considered smoking an abominable habit, he would prefer to accompany us. In any case, he said, the company of ladies was always preferable to that of men alone, and he thought this old-fashioned habit of separation should be abolished. I think he meant to be charming, but Lady Florence did not appreciate his remarks.

  Fixing him with a regal glare, she said, “You misunderstand the purpose of the custom. It is not for the benefit of the gentlemen, but to give us a rest from being always obliged to ‘raise the tone’ in mixed company. If you don’t fancy being wreathed in cigar smoke for the next half hour—indeed, I do not envy it!—you may withdraw, of course…but not with us.”

  Although he kept his face bland and smiled as he shrugged it off, Mr. Chase was surely surprised and displeased. I did not have to wait long to learn what had caused her sudden change toward him.

  She led us upstairs, to the ladies restroom that I had seen before, and pointed out the location of the water closet, before we returned to the large reception room downstairs where tea was being served. As soon as she had assured herself that everything was in hand, Lady Florence drew me aside for a private word.

  “You are looking very well tonight, Miss Lane. Your dress is unusual,and uncommonly fetching.”

  “You are very kind. Why do I have the feeling you disapprove?”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry. But there is something you should know. I must tell you that Mr. Chase has a wife.”

  I stared at her without speaking.

  She put her hand on mine and squeezed. “I should have mentioned it earlier, but it never occurred to me that he…that he might…” She stopped.

  “Find me attractive?” I finished for her, making a face. “Believe me, Lady Florence, I took no pleasure in his attention! His marital status is a matter of indifference. But where is his wife? Back home in America, I suppose, with no idea…”

  “She is here.”

  “Here?” Startled, I looked around the room, trying to recall any possibilities among the female guests.

  “I mean, in the house. She is upstairs, in bed, I suppose. She did not join us this evening as she was feeling indisposed. She is often unwell, I fear.”

  I imagined a pale, consumptive invalid. “Have you met her?”

  “Of course. She is a sweet, shy, delicate little thing, and very young. Hardly more than a child, she seems. They met in Paris.”

  “She’s French?”

  “No, a Russian princess. You remember the Cossack?”

  I shuddered. “I wish I could forget!”

  “He belongs to her family.”

  “A relative?”

  She looked shocked. “How could you imagine…someone like that…I mean he is their property. A serf.”

  I reminded her that the serfs had long been emancipated, but she was impatient with my pedantry.

  “Technically, perhaps, they are free, but you know old ways linger on. His parents were certainly born into the bondage of the land, and as such were effectively slaves of the landowners. So it would not be surprising if—”

  “Talking politics, Flo?” An older, dark-haired woman in a badly fitting blue gown joined us in our corner. She gave me a cordial nod. “Sounds suspiciously like socialism to me—property and slavery in this day and age. And that little speech you gave downstairs—are you planning to join the suffragettes?”

  “Not at all, Agnes.” Lady Florence gave a trill of laughter. “In fact, we were speaking of history. I prefer to leave politics, along with cigars, to the men. Have you met my friend Miss Lane?”

  Chapter 15

  Asking the Cards

  I was eager to discuss the events of the evening with my partner, but he still had not returned to Gower Street the following morning when Gabrielle arrived with her gée in tow. A good night’s sleep had restored the medium’s spirits and vitality, but not her memory. She recalled arr
iving at Belgrave Square, and the glittering room full of well-dressed strangers; she remembered sitting down beside Gabrielle and listening to “the big, handsome m’lord” saying something about the American medium, but of the demonstration she remembered little, only that she had felt so comfortable and relaxed that she had nodded off. Perhaps fortunately, she had no recollection of her public humiliation.

  Concluding her brief explanation, she said, “So, I am asleep, and den I wake up and find myself in bed.” She shook her head, perplexed. “How dis ting happen, I not know. I very sorry for it.”

  “You needn’t apologize, darling,” said Gabrielle. “It was not your fault. Not one bit of it. He did it. I don’t know how, but he made you fall asleep, and then he made those things fall on you, and now you’re a laughingstock, and everyone who saw it must think Fiorella is a drunken sot.”

  Passionately she assured me that although the signora liked a glass of wine with her meals, on that day she’d had nothing more stimulating than strong, black tea; and nothing had passed her lips while they were in the house in Belgrave Square. “Otherwise, I should feel sure that he must have drugged her.”

  “Do you mean Mr. Chase?”

  “Who else?” She glared at me indignantly. “You surely don’t mean to suggest the spirits have turned against Fiorella?”

  I remembered how Mr. Chase had insisted the sleepy medium should be made to perform. It would not, perhaps, have been surprising if she had been unable, but what had happened was not a sign of failing powers, it was a deliberate mockery; and Mr. Chase was, I guessed, the only person in that room capable of causing it.

  “He’s ruined our chances in London.”

  “But why? She posed no threat.”

  “I disagree. I think he did feel threatened, foolish though it may sound. For all his great powers, Mr. Chase is a small, vain, greedy man. He can’t bear to share. He wants it all—the attention, the praise, and most of all the money.”

  Despite my distrust of the man, her description did not convince me. He had treated Signora Gallo very shabbily, and had a cruel sense of humor, but it seemed to me that his behavior was not the result of fear or any lack of confidence. If anything, he was overconfident and delighted in displaying his power over someone who could not fight back. But I did not say any of what I was thinking, choosing instead to pick up on her final point. “Money? His wife is a Russian princess, and I think she must be very rich.”

  “Oh, don’t be so sure. Titles in Russia don’t mean what they do here,” she said, without so much as a flicker to suggest she was surprised to learn he had a wife. “And even if she has a fortune, you must have noticed that rich people never think they have enough.”

  “But how much can he need?” I told her what Lady Florence had told me about the retinue of servants who required their own house. “I can’t imagine that Lord Bennington is funding that. But if Mr. Chase can afford to rent his own house, why doesn’t he live there with his servants?”

  This time I had managed to shift her attention from the harm done to Fiorella’s reputation. She stared at me. “How very strange! It may be only a little mews house, of course, but it’s certainly an odd way of proceeding. Married couples usually like to have their own home, if they can afford it, and if they are paying servants they don’t need whilst living off Lord Bennington, the wife must be rich as Croesus.” An idea made her sit up very straight. “Perhaps they aren’t really servants, but relations—rough yokels from the backwoods of America who would be an embarrassment in an English drawing room, but he must support them, so keeps them tucked away out of sight.”

  “More likely they are her embarrassing dependents,” I said, and told her about the Cossack. The memory of my brief, unexpected encounter with that strange figure in the upstairs corridor of the house in Belgrave Square still had the power to chill my blood, but I went some way toward diluting my fear by turning the experience into an amusing anecdote.

  After that, we discussed our perceptions of Mr. Chase and his powers—the conversation I had been longing to have with Mr. Jesperson. Gabrielle was determined that Chase was a fraud—but that was no more than prejudice; she wanted to believe psychic powers were bestowed by the spirits upon deserving souls only.

  “But how did he work his fraud?” I pointed out that Mr. Jesperson, Lord Bennington, and the journalist had all handled the instruments and found no wires or attachments that could have been responsible for their levitation and noise-making. Mr. Chase had been seated too far away, and in full view of all of us, making the usual methods of fakery impossible.

  “I don’t know,” Gabrielle admitted. “He must be very clever—I can’t deny that. But the way he treated Fiorella—would any honest medium ever try to discredit the genuine powers of another?”

  “I don’t say he’s honest. But he must have powers above the ordinary. The things we saw him do in full light…clearly visible…”

  She jumped in quickly. “He didn’t do everything in the light. His own levitation—and the manifestation of Lord Bennington’s wife. That’s what people were most struck by. That’s what they will remember when they speak of the powerful medium Mr. Chase—not that nonsense with the trumpet, but the idea that he made a dead woman return.

  “Oh, it was very convincing—I’ve never seen an apparition done better—but a very effective ghost can be made using muslin, luminous paint, and a photograph. It would not be difficult to get a photograph of Lady Lorna. What about that spirit cabinet? It must have been there for a reason. There may have been a person hidden inside, dressed up like Lady Lorna…”

  I reminded her of the way the apparition had vanished, but she waved away my objections. “Come now, you are usually more skeptical than I. Surely you do not take Mr. Chase at his own valuation? That man is crooked.”

  “I do not trust him any more than you do. But if he is using trickery, I don’t see how.”

  “The spirit cabinet—”

  “Yes, I find that suspicious. But we’ll have to ask Mr. Jesperson.”

  At that very moment the door opened, and in he walked, a newspaper tucked under one arm, and his pockets bulging with rolls and pastries. “What did you want to ask me?”

  “Good morning!” I said, giving him a look.

  Remembering his manners, he said good morning to us all, and inquired about Signora Gallo’s health. Formalities concluded, he drew up a chair and snapped open his paper. “You may be interested in what the journalist had to say about last night’s séance.”

  “Ah, the man who inspected the spirit cabinet with you,” said Gabrielle. “We were wondering: What did you make of it?”

  He smiled to himself. “I saw what I expected to see. I cannot speak for the journalist, of course—but let me read you his words aloud.”

  The report of “a successful séance in Belgrave Square” had the faintly mocking tone one had come to expect from the popular press, but on the whole, it was quite respectful. The author of the piece admitted that, on the witness of his own senses, and having been able to observe everything from such an unusually well-lighted perspective, he was convinced that no trickery had been involved, and suggested that Mr. C. C. Chase might be the proof that researchers in the Society for Psychical Research had been hunting for these past two decades.

  I noticed that he made no reference to the spirit cabinet.

  “That is because he thinks it was not used. And because he thinks—having been allowed to look inside—that it was empty. He never asked himself for what purpose such a large, empty, useless piece of furniture should have been set up behind the medium’s chair.”

  “But you also said it was empty.”

  He shook his head reprovingly. “I did not. I said that I found what I expected to find—nothing. We all saw an empty cabinet when Chase opened the door. But—there are such things as false backs and false bottoms. As a boy, I had a box into which I would ask some unsuspecting soul to place a coin. I would close it, make magic passes, hand it b
ack. Lo, the coin was gone! More magic passes, and when I opened it the other way, hey, presto! the coin had returned.”

  I said, “So there could have been someone hidden inside—”

  Gabrielle gave a triumphant wriggle. “What did I say? It would have been someone dressed in black and wearing a mask of Lady Lorna.”

  Mr. Jesperson refolded the newspaper. Signora Gallo looked bored, fidgeting in her chair, and I suddenly remembered the original purpose of their visit and went to fetch the deck of cards I had borrowed from Miss Jessop’s room.

  They were special cards, a pack of seventy-eight that were very different from our own familiar playing cards. When not in use, they were kept wrapped in a large purple silk scarf, which I had not disturbed.

  Handing the silken package to Signora Gallo, I asked her gently if she felt up to the task, telling her that I did not wish to overtax her powers.

  She bounced a little in her chair. “Si, si. Yes. Is fine.” She unwrapped the little bundle and ran her fingers over the cards. Her eyes closed and she sucked in a breath and then slowly exhaled.

  “Si, si. She is there.”

  “Where?” Mr. Jesperson leaned forward intently.

  “She thinks often of these…They are her friends, and she misses them. It not like she thought. The beautiful angel, the man who carried her away, he is gone. He not come back. He not take her to heaven but to a leetle room.”

  “Where?”

  The medium’s eyes popped open. She shook her head. “They no say. She no know.”

  “Can’t you tell us anything more? Is she still in London?”

  The medium shrugged.

  “Think about the room,” Mr. Jesperson urged. “Is there a window? Can she see anything outside? Is she alone? If she’s a prisoner, she must be fed. Someone must come…Who is it? How often? Does he speak to her?”

  Under this barrage of questions Signora Gallo began to look peevish, shrugging and shaking her head by turns. At last she burst out, “They no say, these cards. Only paper! Cheap. No good.”